So: I trust Google for search, the core of how it stays in business. Similarly for Maps and Earth, which have tremendous public-good side effects but also are integral to Google’s business. Plus Gmail and Drive, which keep you in the Google ecosystem. But do I trust Google with Keep? No. The idea looks promising, and you could see how it could ended up as an integral part of the Google Drive strategy. But you could also imagine that two or three years from now this will be one more “interesting” experiment Google has gotten tired of.

Until I know a reason that it’s in Google’s long-term interest to keep Keep going, I’m not going to invest time with it or lodge info there. The info could of course be extracted or ported somewhere else — Google has been very good about helping people rescue data from products it has killed — but why bother getting used to a system that might go away? And I don’t understand how Google can get anyone to rely on its experimental products unless it has a convincing answer for the “how do we know you won’t kill this?” question.

This is going to be a real problem for Google going forward with its services. Since I rely so much on Evernote, I’m not really sure what the point of even trying Keep out is.